SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket made its record-tying 22nd launch on Sunday night (August 11), launching two satellites that will provide broadband service to the Arctic Circle.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission’s (ASBM) twin spacecraft lifted off from Vandenberg Space Center in California at 10:02 p.m. EDT on Sunday (7:02 p.m. California local time, 2:02 a.m. GMT on August 12).
As the Falcon 9 rose into the darkening evening sky, it penetrated coastal fog, a common occurrence for launches from Vandenberg.
The Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth as scheduled about 8.5 minutes after launch, landing on SpaceX’s drone “Of Course I Still Love You” parked in the Pacific Ocean.
This was the booster’s 22nd launch and landing. SpaceX Mission DescriptionThis matches SpaceX’s previous rocket reuse record, set in June this year during the launch of its Starlink internet satellites.
Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 upper stage continued to deliver the ASBM satellites into orbit, with the first satellite scheduled to be deployed 42.5 minutes after liftoff, followed by the second five minutes after that.
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The ASBM is “intended to expand broadband coverage into the Arctic for the U.S. Space Command and Space Norway.” According to Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman built the mission’s two satellites. (Space Norway is a state-owned company that develops and manages the nation’s strategic space infrastructure.)
In its mission description, Northrop Grumman wrote that the ASBM satellites would operate in highly elliptical orbits to reach the coverage area and would carry multiple instruments “including military payloads for U.S. and Norwegian forces, commercial payloads for Viasat, radiation monitors for the European Commission and more.”
Sunday’s launch was part of a busy weekend for SpaceX, which launched 21 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Command Station in Florida on Saturday morning (August 10). SpaceX also attempted to launch another Starlink satellite from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, also on Florida’s Space Coast, on Sunday morning, but called it off with 46 seconds left in the countdown.
